CHARLOTTE – Last January, a couple of weeks after his team won Clemson’s first national championship in 35 years, Coach Dabo Swinney found himself a long way from home – Brooklyn, N.Y., to be precise – on a recruiting trip with defensive coordinator Brent Venables and offensive line coach Robbie Caldwell.

While his assistants waited in the car, Swinney stopped at a small stand in their hotel to get a bottle of water.

“I could tell this guy was looking at me and I could tell he was probably from another country – New York is the melting pot, right? – and all of a sudden he was like, ‘I am so happy your team won. I pulled for your team!’

“Instantly we had this connection, so here I am talking to this guy in Brooklyn and he’s talking about watching Clemson play. I went down to the car and said, ‘We ain’t in Kansas anymore, boys.’ I ain’t never been in Brooklyn and had anybody know who I was.”

Welcome to the impact of a national championship.

Due to Clemson’s recent successes, many college football fans had become familiar with Dabo Swinney, but when you’ve smooched a national championship trophy in front of a viewing audience of more than 26 million, it elevates your recognition level ten-fold.

That recognition factor is one of many impacts a national title can have on a coach and his program, and Swinney and the Tigers are not immune.

After 35 years as the hunter rather than the hunted, Swinney and his team will be sporting a bullseye this fall. The Tigers are expected to enter the season ranked among the nation’s elite and an early favorite to contend for a third consecutive Atlantic Coast Conference championship.

But perhaps more than ever, there are more opponents – certainly within Clemson’s own Atlantic Division – who are capable of knocking the Tigers off a lofty perch.

“Well, it ain’t real far from the penthouse to the outhouse,” Swinney said. “We all know that. It’s a few plays here and there, and that’s really where this league is.”

With six consecutive 10-win seasons under the belt – a first in program history – and a national title to boot, Clemson certainly has elbowed its way into the penthouse.

“I feel like we lifted every cap, took off every lid that was keeping the program from being elite,” said All-America defensive tackle Christian Wilkins. “I’m not saying we’re the most elite program now, but it puts us right up there with those other elite programs.”

And with that status comes both pressure and perks.

Expectations remain high, despite the loss of 10 All-ACC selections, including the best quarterback in school history.

At the crux of the optimism is the fact that the Tigers’ recruiting efforts also are at an elite level.

“From a recruiting standpoint, winning the national championship helps us tremendously,” Wilkins said. “Recruits want to go to a place where they know they can win and see all the hard work that’s being put in. Recruiting before was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to win a national championship,’ but now it’s like, ‘We’ve won a national championship, lets’ go get another.’ ”

Clemson had long-since broken ground on its new football operations center, but the fact that its grand opening coincided with signing day a few weeks after the Tigers won the national title proved a bonus of grand proportions.

One couldn’t have penned a more timely script.

National recruiting guru Tom Lemming recognized as much, and knew that Clemson’s rewards from the national title would be more tangible in upcoming recruiting cycles.

“Clemson is hot now,” Lemming said. “Everybody’s looking their way.”

And what’s not to like when there’s a national championship trophy perched in the entrance to a football complex that essentially qualifies as a playground custom-made for 18-to-22 year olds?

“The national title will really pay off next year,” Lemming said. “This year they only had a couple of weeks to take advantage of it. Now there’s almost a full year for them to brag about it.”

Swinney already has a seen a dramatic change in recruiting and the way the school is perceived nationally. Years ago, he said, he had to beg Tajh Boyd just to accept a visit. Now the script has flipped.

“That’s been the biggest change – a lot of people, not only do they take our call or we get the visit, a lot of people are calling us,” Swinney said. “We have young men from all over the country now that would have never called us that want to come see Clemson, and I think that’s pretty cool.”

Other coaches from program around the country want to come see Clemson, too, and glean what they can from the inner workings of the program.

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Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney takes a selfie with the trophy prior to the National Championship Game against Alabama in January.(Photo: BART BOATWRIGHT/Staff)

Nick Saban’s program at Alabama has long been a benchmark for how teams prepare and how a program is staffed; Swinney has lifted pages from that blueprint and expanded on them.

When your players are sporting national championship rings, other folks want to know all they can about the path they took to earn them.

Swinney says it’s all about a daily focus on “the little things,” and how his players work “when no one’s watching.” That may sound simplistic or overused, but one can’t argue with the results.

“We didn’t need to win the national championship for me to feel good about our team and the way they work,” Swinney said. “What if we hadn’t have made that one play? Does that make us less of team? No.

“I judge that stuff based on their daily commitment, what they’re doing off the field, academically, how they grind when nobody’s paying attention. The national championship was the only thing we hadn’t done as a program, so we kind of checked that box and so people can’t hold that over their head anymore.”

And few people have, whether it be a complete stranger in a Brooklyn hotel or a longtime Crimson Tide fan in a convenience store in rural Alabama.

“I haven’t changed as a person, but I have more people come up to me randomly and say hello or give me their war chant or ‘Roll Tide’ or whatever – whoever their team is,” Swinney said. “And I think that’s great.”